CIM Industrial Systems provides a solution for monitoring the supply of power to CERN’s particle accelerator

The Danish company developed a ‘Transient Recorder System’ – an intelligent measurement system with multiple data collection stations, each synchronously monitoring the power to CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.

Stabile power supply is a key issue for optimal functionality of CERN’s 10.000 superconducting magnets, and CERN must constantly monitor the accelerator to detect and report any occurrence of irregularities in the power supply. Not only is this important in order to avoid breakdowns, but also critical for gathering actual and accurate data regarding the power performance over time in order to improve stability.

A solution that oversees and collects critical data

CIM Industrial Systems won the tender to develop software that would integrate with CERN’s network of seven measurement units, placed at seven different places in the 27-kilometer ring. Each unit logs data to monitor power behavior at its point in the ring, and synchronously sends the information back to a central computer.

- The task involved distributed data collection – one of our experience- areas through previous projects with the wind turbine industry. Furthermore, we already had a tested product that could be adapted to CERN’s specific needs,” said Anders Meister, Director of CIM Industrial Systems.

CIM was a natural choice

The CERN choice of CIM Industrial Systems was based on various factors, including CIM’s existing partnership with the company National Instruments, which had provided the hardware for CERN’s measurement system. CIM Industrial Systems had already developed many of the required middleware components. In accordance with its standard procedures, CIM Industrial Systems’ engineers worked closely with CERN’s staff throughout development, beta testing and implementation processes, continuously making adjustments to achieve a perfect end-result.

- Because of the complexity of the system, we used CIM Industrial Systems A/S to design the architecture and provide a solution that we could easily update. CIM was an ideal partner for this project because of its expertise using LabVIEW and CompactRIO systems. The company already had multiple LabVIEW modules available to reuse within this project, which saved a lot of development time. CIM provided a system that will be easy to implement, maintain and modify, for many years to come, says CERN staff member Odd Oyvind Andreassen